Orion’s first space flight, now in high-res (photos and videos)

Last week, after a scrubbed first launch attempt due to gusting winds and faulty fuel valves, NASA’s Orion capsule successfully launched aboard a Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The launch into space, Orion’s climb to a heady altitude of 3,600 miles above Earth, and then its red-hot atmospheric reentry at 20,000 miles per hour, were all executed perfectly — really, not a single aspect of the mission went wrong in any way. Almost all of Orion’s new features and systems were successfully tested, meaning we should be on schedule for an asteroid landing in the next 10 years, and Mars within 15. In short, it’s a very, very exciting time to be alive.

During the launch and flight of Orion, the various video feeds and photos — though amazing and live — were fairly grainy and low-resolution. Now, a few days later, we have fantastic footage from the launch of Orion and the Delta IV Heavy, the Earth as seen by Orion during its orbits, and a video feed from a US Navy ship of NASA’s new capsule hurtling through the atmosphere and then splashing down gently in the Pacific Ocean. Read on, to relive Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1) in all its high-def glory.

Launch

First, the entire launch sequence, until around 10 minutes — by which point, Orion is already traveling at around 17,000 miles per hour and well on its way to completing its first orbit of Earth. Obviously, make sure YouTube is showing you 720p (sadly there’s no 1080p stream available).

Now, some nice high-resolution photos of the launch. They’re all taken by NASA’s photographers. In most cases, you can click to zoom in, if you’re looking for a new desktop wallpaper.

Orion and the Delta IV Heavy rocket, at dawn

Launch time!

An alternate angle of the launch, with the thunderous rockets scaring some birds

In spaaaaace

Next, a few images taken by Orion while it was still in space. I suspect there will eventually be some high-res video footage from the cameras that were inside Orion, looking out the windows, but NASA hasn’t yet released it.

Earth, as seen by Orion

Earth, as seen out the window of Orion on its way back, from a fairly high altitude

A rather awesome photo from Orion, showing a surge of heat from atmospheric reentry

Landing

And finally, here’s Orion plunging through some clouds before deploying its main parachutes, which slow the capsule down to around 25 mph — slow enough for a nice, safe splashdown in the Paciifc Ocean, a few hundred miles off the coast of California.

And some high-res photos of the landing, as seen from the US Navy recovery vessels and the unmanned drone that was covering the splashdown area.

Orion descending through the clouds into the Pacific Ocean, as seen by an unpiloted drone

The Orion capsule,, shortly after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean

Orion, being picked up by amphibious transporter ship USS Anchorage

Further reading

For those of you with a slightly more scientific bent, NASA also gave a fairly detailed press briefing after the mission.

For more photos, the NASA HQ Flickr feed is pretty good — but it still needs to be updated with lots of photos from after the launch. Hopefully that’ll happen in the next few days.

Orion was offloaded from the USS Anchorage on December 1 in San Diego. It will now be transported to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for further investigation. We should get some more imagery and video from NASA over the next couple of weeks — especially from those all-important cameras that were actually aboard Orion.

With this first flight test such a success, we now move onto the first test of the new Space Launch System in 2017, which will see the Orion capsule travel all the way around the Moon. And if that is successful… well, we will probably see humans land on Mars within our lifetime.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2016 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.